VMware Horizon 7.1 - Just-In-Time, Instant Clones Improvements, and more

On February 7, 2017 VMware Announced VMware Horizon 7.1 with this update came a lot of great improvements to the Horizon View platform. Below i am going to cover the top items that have been new or improvments in this relese.

Just-in-time Management Platform (JMP): 

The following three VMware technologies is how we get to the Just-In-Time Management Platform.

• Instant Clones for ultra-fast desktop provisioning
• App Volumes for real-time app delivery
• User Environment Manager for contextual policy management.

As I am sure you all know all three of the above technologies where part of the last release of Horizon. So what is so new? That is now not only virtual desktops but also published applications for both on premises and in the cloud can take advantage of JMP.

To see this in action VMware has posted this quick video showing published applications with JMP

Instant Clone update:

As you may know or may not if you are running instant clones today you cant use vGPUs. Now in Horizon 7.1 you can use vGPUs with your instant clone pools.  As you can see the feature parity between Instant clones and linked clones keeps getting closer. 

Blast Extreme Improvements: 

In this release Blast Extreme is getting just a little better and that is with something called BEAT. BEAT stands for Blast Extreme Adaptive Transport and is the new UDP based transport for the Blast Extreme protocol. 

• Helps improve user experience across a wide variety of network types (LAN, Public Wi-Fi, and Mobile networks)
• Will apply adaptive bit rates for connections where the latency and connection stability varies.
• Provides packet loss optimizations for non optimal connections
• Provides latency optimization for high latency connections.

Skype for Business Plugin:

So this is a feature I have been really wanting to get my hands on since VMware made the announcement in Q4 of 2016 about the partnership between Microsoft and VMware to build a new plugin for Skype For Business. If you are not sure what this does in short it is a to offload Skype for Business traffic to the client. The one thing to note is this feature is going to be in tech preview in this release so it is not ready for prime time yet but it is a step forward. 

New offerings for Horizon:

One great thing that both of the new offerings have is they include both JMP and BEAT.

Horizon Cloud:

This is as VMware calls it the next-gen desktop as a service offering. Horizon Cloud allows you to manage their desktops through a cloud service and pair this service with cloud-hosted infrastructure (IBM SoftLayer) or bring your own appliances (Dell/EMC, QCT or HDS) to the table.

With Horizon Cloud, you now can buy a single license for as little as $16/user or $26/concurrent connection (infrastructure not included). You can then pair this service with the infrastructure of your choice—either BYO appliances or hosted infrastructure from VMware. This makes your buying decision easier. If you have a mix of use cases that require some of your infrastructure to be on-prem and some in the cloud, you have one offering and license that covers you across both.

I still think a very good use case for this is if you need a DR solution and now you can even take advantage of JMP in the cloud. 

Horizon Apps:

This has been a long awaited offering in my opinion as it helps close the gap between Citrix and VMware. This now gives VMware a standalone solution that can stand up to Citrix XenApp and not require customers to buy Horizon advanced to be able to do what Xenapp does. The big thing that sets VMware apart from others here is the speed and time savings you can get with this solution. This will allow IT to be able to adjust to the business demands very quickly. 

Principle Technologies has done a compassion between Citrix Xenapp with PVS and Horizon Apps with JMP (Click Here). As you can see the speed and time savings is huge.

This solution comes in two version:

1. Horizon Apps Standard: App Publishing (RDSH apps and Session-based Desktops, User Environment Manager and vSphere and vCenter.
2. Horizon Apps Advanced: App Publishing (RDSH apps and/or session-based desktops), vSphere/vCenter and all of our JMP technologies (Instant Clones, App Volumes and User Environment Manager).